A Natural History of Hell: Stories

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Are you from the neighborhood?” she asked, her back to me.

  “No, I’m in town for a thing at the convention center.”

  “The science fiction show?”

  “That’s it,” I said. “Have you been over there?”

  “I’d like to, but I’m working this whole weekend. My daddy’s in the hospital, so I’m filling in for him.”

  “Oh, hope he’s OK.”

  “He’s got the prostate. You know what I mean?” She turned and looked at me.

  “Not yet, but I’m sure someday I will.”

  She laughed, put her rag down, and walked through a door to the left.

  While she was in the back, the front door of the place opened and I heard someone come in. I knew they were headed for the bar because their labored breathing grew closer. A moment later, an old, heavyset guy in a floppy brown suit and white shirt, yellow tie loosened to the point of uselessness, took a seat a few down from me. I looked over and he nodded his big potato head in my direction. He was mostly bald, but little squalls of hair erupted here and there across his scalp. His thick glasses were steamed, and sweat drenched his jowls.

  “It’s a fuckin’ oven out there,” he said.

  Trying to avoid a conversation, I just nodded.

  The bartender came back into the bar and, seeing him, asked, “What you want?”

  He stopped gasping for a moment and said, “Gin, straight up, miss. Not a shot, a full glass.”

  She set a glass in front of him and poured right to the rim. Due to past martini experiences, the sight of it made me gag.

  “Seven dollars,” she said. He put two twenties on the bar and thanked her.

  I knew that eventually the guy was going to start a conversation, and although I wasn’t keen on talking to him, at the same time I had no intention of leaving Honey’s until I’d finished a second Colt.

  “You’re at the convention? Right?” he finally said.

  I wasn’t wearing my badge and had a moment of panic over the fact that I could be so easily identified with that to which I belonged. There was no denying it, though. The bartender noticed my hesitation. “How’d you know?” I finally said.

  “I saw you over there, walking the hallways.” His voice was breathy and slightly high-pitched. There was a kind of weird resonance to it.

  “Some hallways. Place is like a labyrinth.”

  “I had to rent one of those scooters,” he said, and his laugh turned into a hacking cough.

  “You a fan?”

  “I’m a writer,” I said.

  “Me too,” he confided and took a long drink.

  “Two writers at once,” said the bartender. “That might be a first for Honey’s.”

  “It’s not as auspicious as all that, my dear,” he said. Then he looked at me and asked what I’d published.

  “Last book of a trilogy came out this year,” I said. “I’ve only been at it since ninety-seven.”

  “Live long and prosper,” he said and flashed us the Spock split-finger deal. “My first publications were back in the late sixties.”

  “Novels or stories?” I asked.

  “Always stories,” he said. “I only wrote one novel, and you can’t find that anywhere.”

  “I want to write stories,” said the bartender. “I’m in my last semester at community college, and I’m going to Temple to take fiction writing.”

  “Three writers,” said the old guy. He took a drink and smoothed his wispy islands of hair.

  “You like SF?” I asked her.

  “And fantasy,” she said. “I’m taking a lit course this summer. We’re reading Ellison, Butler, Moorcock, Tiptree, Dick.”

  “As long as you lay off that slipstream drivel—the lime Jell-O of subgenres,” he said.

  “That’s next semester,” she said. “Do you guys make a lot of money?”

  We laughed.

  “Money can be made,” said the old guy. “But you can’t make a living now writing stories.”

  I asked his name and he told me, “Cole Werber.” It didn’t ring a bell, but my knowledge of the genre was minimal. I told them my name, and the bartender told us hers was Breelyn.

  “Where’d you publish your early stories?” I asked Werber.

  “Back in the day, all over. Galaxy, Amazing, F&SF, If, and one you don’t hear about now, Venture. I wrote a series of stories about this alien named Pirsute. He lived on the planet Borlox, and he was a kind of vegetable creature—but arms and legs and a head like a human. Skin the consistency of an eggplant, a mop of greenery for hair, a thistle beard, and eyes like cherries. He was a detective. I based him on Poe’s Auguste Dupin. You know, ratiocination, etc. He had a sidekick, who was an orphaned Earth girl with a photographic memory.”

  “I love that kind of shit,” said the bartender.

  “That sounds cool,” I said.

  “Shit may be the operative word,” said Werber. “But my plan was to link all the stories in what we used to call a fix-up and then publish my first novel.”

  “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” said Breelyn.

  Werber waved his hand and smiled. “I’m just joking.”

  “How many stories did you have in the series?” I asked.

  “Well, I published the first one in sixty-five, and by sixty-nine I had a dozen and a half published.”

  “Eighteen stories in four years? That’s pretty impressive,” I said.

  “Not really, not for the time. Some of those writers back then cranked ’em out a couple a month. I think Silverberg published a hundred by the time he was this young lady’s age. I was twenty when I published the first one.”

  “Did you have a lot of readers?” asked Breelyn.

  “Actually, people liked them. They followed them from magazine to magazine. I’d get a lot of response when I’d go to the conventions.”

  “So then why’d nobody read the novel?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t that novel. The Pirsute novel was never put together. The one nobody read was called Rocket Ship to Hell.”

  “Great title,” I said.

  “Religion meets science,” said Breelyn and made herself a whiskey on the rocks.

  “Maybe not religion,” said Werber, “but the whole thing reeked of mythology. I could tell you folks about it, but it’d take me a little while. It’s a remarkable story, though, no lie. I never really told it to anyone before, but with my health the way it is now there’s not much they could do to me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Breelyn and took a long drink.

  I could tell by this guy’s shtick that if I went for his story, I could be there for an eternity. At the same time, the way he stared at me waiting for an answer, eyes big behind those thick lenses, it was almost as if he was offering a challenge, writer to writer—Are you going to go back and walk the empty corridors or are you going to stay right here where the story is?

  Although I’d not yet finished my first, I ordered another forty. When Breelyn put it on the bar, I said, “OK, let’s have it.”

  The old guy nodded with a look of satisfaction and polished off about three fingers of gin in a gulp. “It was 1969, and I’d run out of Pirsute stories. I tried to go in a different direction, and my imagination always wound up back on Borlox, following the vegetable detective and the girl with the photographic memory, but nothing ever happened. My imagination was shot. The bad part was that I was broke. I’d been trying to live off the money from the stories—late on rent, phone bill, car payments. I was a mess.

  “The day after they repossessed my car, I got a phone call from this guy who said he wanted me to come and do a reading and talk for his club. I told him, OK, but that I had no car. He said, ‘We’ll send a car for you. And the
event pays three hundred dollars.’ I almost dropped the phone. For that kind of money, I’d have walked.

  “Two days later, a limousine showed up in front of my apartment complex to the minute the guy on the phone, Mr. Masterson, had promised. The driver got out and opened the door for me. About twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of this mansion. I don’t know where it was. The place was gigantic, from some time in the nineteenth century. We got out, and the driver led me inside and through a series of hallways and rooms until we came to a closed door somewhere at the back of the house. The driver knocked; a voice inside said, ‘Enter.’ He opened the door, stood back, and I stepped in.

  “There were books lining the walls, and in the center of the room was a well-polished table at which sat four old gentlemen, dressed to the nines, each holding what looked like toy rockets. They put their rockets down and stood when I entered. I made the rounds, shook hands, got their names, and took a seat at the head of the table. Across from me was Masterson, who seemed to be the head of the group. ‘Welcome to the Rocket Club,’ he said.” Werber took a sip and said, “Are you with me?”

  Breelyn lit a cigarette, and I pulled the second forty closer. She said, “Yeah,” and he went back to it.

  “I’ll try to speed it up a little,” he said. “The Rocket Club was these four old, white-haired farts. They were mad about science fiction. Knew just about everything going back to the thirties and could talk about any writer I mentioned. It was more an education for me than them. To top that, they asked me all kinds of intricate questions about the Pirsute stories. They remembered more about my own stuff than I did. I read them my most recent publication, ‘Slaves of Dust.’ Some solid vegetable love and death. When I was finished, they applauded so much I was afraid one of them would drop over. Instead, Masterson asked me if when I was a boy, I ever wanted to be an astronaut.

  “I said, ‘Probably,’ and shrugged, but it was true, I’d dreamed of it when I was a kid. When I’d told my father, he’d said, ‘You’re a blockhead at math and you’re afraid of heights. Forget it.’ But I never did forget it.

  “ ‘How’d you like to make fifty thousand dollars instead of three hundred?’ asked Masterson.

  “I was stunned. I just sat there with my mouth open.

  “ ‘We’re each exceedingly wealthy,’ said the grandpa next to me with the white goatee and sideburns.

  “ ‘We can send you into outer space,’ said the heavy one with the ruffled shirt collar.

  “I was floored and a little worried they were dangerously insane. When all was said and done, though, this was the deal as proposed by Masterson: They were funding a secret joint project with NASA. Because they were putting up the bread, they called the shots on the mission and rocket design. What they wanted to do was put artists in outer space to witness the experience and then transcribe it to the populace through some work conceived on the journey. In addition to me, who they wanted to be the mission’s official writer, they were looking for a painter and a musician. Four days in space, and I collected for writing a story about it.

  “At first, all I could think about was the fifty thousand, but then it began to dawn on me that I wasn’t in the best shape. I was seventy pounds overweight and smoked a couple packs a day. Besides that I didn’t know how to do much else but make up stories about the vegetable detective. I actually said, ‘Do you think I’m the best candidate?’

  “Masterson looked at his cronies, and they nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we tried to get Thomas Pynchon, but he turned us down.’ ”

  “Come on,” I said to Werber. “Is that for real?”

  “I wouldn’t mind doing that,” said Breelyn.

  “You’d be a lot more fit for it than I was,” said Werber. “Is it real?” He took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt. “As God is my judge.” He put the glasses back on.

  “You say NASA was in on this?” I asked.

  “Yes. They were supposed to build the rocket. They used it as an opportunity to test out some new things and to simplify the control mechanisms of the ship, all on the Rocket Club’s dime.”

  “You did it, right?” asked Breelyn.

  “Yeah,” he said, pushed his glass forward, and took out a handkerchief to wipe his face. She filled him up with gin, and, after a prolonged coughing spree, he was off.

  “I took it. I needed the fucking money. Oops, sorry, miss. I needed the money. We shook on it. Two weeks later, with a five-thousand-dollar advance in my bank account, I was in an apartment in downtown Vegas. I was there to train for the mission. My handler and apartment mate was an ex-astronaut named Maxwell Penfield. He was a sturdily built old man with a tan and a crew cut. At night, he’d sit by the air conditioner in his boxer shorts and drink a pint of bourbon while reading Herodotus. The night I arrived I told him I’d never seen his name mentioned in any of the NASA missions. He nodded and said, ‘I only flew secret missions.’ I questioned him about it, and he said, ‘Do you think that every time the US puts men in space that it’s going to be on TV? Seriously, now.’

  “My training started the next day. We had a breakfast that Max prepared—every meal was fruit and meat. I was on the can twice a day. You could set the atomic clock by it. After breakfast, we walked for two hours before the real heat came on. Then it was lunch, downtown at a place called Hoppy’s where we always had a burger, no bun, and the melon bowl. No time to digest, though, ’cause we were off to the Castaways Casino, where we climbed the stairs to the top floor. That took me an hour and was agonizing. Max was patient, though. I’d complain and he’d laugh. ‘Come on, move that gravy,’ he’d say as I gasped on every landing.

  “The afternoons were given over to gambling. Max said it would test my stress levels. He made me gamble every day, with my own money. It was exhilarating and depressing, sometimes at the same time. I lost three thousand dollars in the first week and in the second won four thousand. At the end of the two weeks I’d lost some weight. Actually, considering the time, a good amount, but I was still fifty pounds overweight. My nightly push-up tally had gone from three to fifteen. On our last day in the apartment, Max told me he was going to give me a final exam.

  “We were in the living room, our bags packed. He reached into his pocket and took out a crisp bill. He held it out so that I could see it was a fifty. He folded it in half, creasing the fold, and then flipped his two fingers and scaled it toward me so that it landed at my feet. ‘If you can pick that up without bending your knees, you pass,’ he said. ‘And if you do, you can keep it.’

  “I sucked my gut in, took a deep breath, stiffened my knees, and swept down on that note like a bald eagle grabbing a salmon out of a stream. Max said, ‘You pass, Werber.’ Then we were in the car, heading out to Groom Lake, what they now call Area Fifty-One.” The old writer took a drink and wiped his face again.

  “Did you really go into outer space?” asked Breelyn as she ran around the bar to grab a stool. She brought it back to her spot next to the liquor shelf and sat down.

  “One of my personal rules for stories is no foreshadowing,” he said.

  In as amiable a tone as possible, I said, “This is getting pretty far-fetched.”

  “Patience, my esteemed colleague,” he said. “The best or worst, depending on your point of view, is yet to come. For on that first day at the testing range, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, I saw the rocket. Now, I knew what a NASA rocket looked like. They were using the Saturn Five at the time. This didn’t look like any rocket I’d ever seen that made it into outer space. It looked way better than that, as if it had been designed by Frank R. Paul, Freas, or Finlay. It was a giant, pointy, silver bullet with four arcing fins at the back. There were three circular portholes lining two sides of the ship, and there was a window near the top in what I assumed was the control cabin. I didn’t detect any stages to it, which meant the whole ship had t
o lift off into space and return in one piece. This is when I started to get nervous.”

  “Who’s Finlay?” asked Breelyn.

  “Those guys were magazine cover artists back before you were born. They did great rocket ships and aliens. Beautiful stuff,” I told her.

  “The future they drew was always more futuristic than what the future ever became,” said Werber. “It was dreams and nightmares of the future.”

  “Still no flying car,” I said.

  “Yeah, but the Rocket Club had the money and influence to make it real. Masterson met us at the launch site. As I stood there gaping at what they’d wrought, he said, ‘The name of the ship is the Icarus, do you know what that’s from?’

  “You mean the Greek myth? I asked.

  “ ‘No, last year’s Planet of the Apes movie. That was the name of the ship in it. The club, to a man, thought that film spectacular.’

  “The Icarus didn’t sit well with me under either interpretation.

  “ ‘Both a hundred percent operational and a hundred percent sense of wonder,’ said Masterson.

  “A long day followed—from the launchpad into the complex, where I met my teachers who would deal with the technical aspects of the mission, and then on to my room. Max helped me bring my bags in from the car. He turned the air conditioner way up and called me into a corner behind the door.

  “ ‘What do you think of that rocket?’ he asked in a whisper.

  “ ‘I can’t believe it’s for real.’

  “ ‘You ever hear of Operation Paperclip?’

  “I knew about it, a move by the US to snatch up all the excellent German scientists after the Second World War ended. A lot of the people they brought in were Nazis. I nodded, wondering why he was whispering.